Tag: lean manufacturing

There are over 1,000 Lean tools and counting that can be used to improve processes and help a business become more Lean. All of them have a time and place but you can achieve remarkable success by doing just a small handful of things really well. So put away your stack of Lean books and close the 90 web pages showering you with overkill Continuous Improvement advice. This article will provide you a simple formula that will help you develop an unstoppable Lean Culture.

Element #1) Strategy Deployment

You need to be clear on what will help the company win in the market. The few things that will generate the greatest success for your company, is your strategy. Then you need a seamless method for deploying these priorities throughout the organization. Your deployment method must leave no employee behind. This means each and every person working in your company needs to understand their role in delivering the strategy and commit to clearly defined improvement objectives for their area of ownership. Each person should establish a target condition that is an improvement on the current condition. This becomes their Continuous Improvement plan – all of which should clearly connect up to the highest ranking leader’s plan. Remember that making progress against your strategy is the very definition of improvement. Any side steps, aka random changes, are a waste of precious resources.

Element #2) A Mechanism for Improving

You need to develop the skill of everyone in your company to make sustainable improvements. The de-facto method for this is called PDCA or Plan-Do-Check-Act. You’re probably familiar with this term or one of it’s many variants. Essentially it’s just a spin off of using the scientific method to discover the truth about your business processes and make changes that work. The only way to do this is good old fashioned trial and error. You form a hypothesis about what will get you better results, you test it, you observe the outcome, then you repeat this process until you discover the truth. This isn’t breakthrough thinking, but in practice, it usually falls apart in the testing and / or repeat as needed phase. The best way to form a hypothesis is to work with a cross-functional team of people close to the process to do a Root Cause Analysis. This gets you to the right answer with less time and effort invested. Just remember that the output of a RCA is just hypothesis that needs to be proven by making changes to the process. The key here is to be deliberate about driving action based on analysis. You need a good way to ensure actions are being executed so you can know from experience what’s really driving process results.

Element #3) Performance Measurement Tools

Without a good way of quantifying performance, you have no idea if you’re actually improving or sustaining results. You’ve probably heard the expression “go with your gut”, but in this case, don’t! You need the numbers. Which numbers you use will vary based on what you’re trying to improve. When it comes to manufacturing value stream execution, you have to go with OEE, or Overall Equipment Effectiveness. OEE is global gold standard. As you experiment with making changes to processes, you need to watch and see what happens to the performance metrics. When you’re really getting to the truth, you can use it to lever the numbers up or down by making the right changes.

Element #4) Leadership Coaching Mechanism

Leaders need to be able to coach their teams to overcome challenges as they work to close the gap to their target condition. This does not mean commanding certain actions that the leader thinks will get results. Commanding is not coaching! Good coaching is a iterative process that allows a person to learn from experience and repetition while the coach observes and provides guidance as needed. The intent is to develop talent and capability in the learner – specifically the talents of learning how to learn, solving problems, making decisions, and improving the process. As a coach, let the learner go as far as they can with their own ability. When they hit a brick wall, and maybe ask for help, give them as little help as needed to overcome the specific issue they’re struggling with. The beauty, and growth, is in the struggle. This may mean teaching them new Lean tools, connecting them with resources, or providing some impromptu therapy. Be flexible – and teach them in the way that they learn best. But just know that the moment you as a leader become disengaged from the coaching process, the learner is likely to disengage as well from the improvement process. Besides, developing the talent of your people is one of your most important jobs.

Element #5) Engagement Mechanism

A Lean Culture is made up of a million small everyday wins. Leaders need to have visibility to these wins as they happen so they can recognize and encourage further progress and success. A person who is striving to improve their process and getting results should not go quarters, months, or even weeks without their leaders realizing and rewarding them for it. This lag time is demotivating. Leaders need to be on top of their game, just as they expect their teams to be.

All this may seem difficult to do if you’re already too busy and don’t have the tools in place to handle these activities effectively. This is where having the right technology makes a world of a difference. Heck, even Toyota has abandoned the old way of thinking that all Lean Tools should be manual processes. They were “suddenly motivated” to adopt technology once they saw themselves falling behind in the market. Fortunately for you and everyone else, technologies like Impruver.com provide enterprise-wide access to the most cutting edge methods that delivers all of the elements mentioned above plus more. Check the videos to the right of this page and click here to learn more.

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OEE or Overall Equipment Effectiveness measures manufacturing performance against perfection. It is regarded as the global benchmark for managing and improving manufacturing efficiency. Any deviation from perfection drives up operating cost. OEE looks at three different losses and multiplies them across to assess total losses. Those losses are:

Availability – This is a measure of downtime (both planned and unplanned)

Throughput – This measures rate loss against the theoretical maximum run rate

Yield – This measures the amount of efficiency lost due to quality issues

Each of these factors has a cost impact. There are measurable financial and other costs associated with having people at work, the lights on, and machines operating. Anytime these things are happening and you aren’t producing at theoretical maximum levels, you are suffering efficiency and financial losses. Most factories are operating at or below 60% OEE but have no idea. Additionally, most factories do not measure productivity, and many who do, use methods that exclude significant losses such as changeover times, start-ups, throughput loss and many others. Again, anytime you have people on the clock and product yet to be made, anything less than the theoretical max output is a loss…for whatever reason – controllable or uncontrollable. At the end of the day, all aspects of running your business are controllable; the only real question is: are you willing to do what it takes to “fix” something that is perceived as “uncontrollable”. I’ve worked with manufacturers who, for years, wrote off “bad raw material” as uncontrollable but have never talked with the supplier about fixing the problem or investigated sourcing with other suppliers. In almost all cases, uncontrollable is synonymous for “we don’t want to deal with it”.

The Logic

For a factory with a direct operating cost of $10M annually and an OEE of 60%, the total efficiency losses are 40%. Therefore 40% of the direct operating costs are also losses, or $4M in this case. At 100% efficiency, the operating cost would be $6M.

World-class execution is 85% OEE, which equates to a direct operating cost of $8.5M in the example above. For the same factory, there is a $2.5M savings opportunity for improving from 60% to 85% OEE. What would you do with an extra $2.5M dollars per year? Expand production? Pay bonuses? Acquire a new business? Buy a small yacht and sail around the world?

Achieving 85% OEE is challenging but attainable for the vast majority of manufacturers. Click the link below to receive a free report on how much savings opportunity you might have based on your direct operating costs and efficiency performance:

If you don’t know your OEE, we can get you up in going on Impruver in less than a month. It will help you track OEE by product, line, shift, team, and even individual. It’s a great tool for highlighting exactly where to focus improvement efforts. For the sake of the tool mentioned in the above link, input 60% as a reference point and see what you get for a savings opportunity if you’re unsure of your current OEE.

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Motion – any movement that takes time and / or effort that does not directly add value. In this series titled “The 8 Lean Wastes and Their Potentially Disastrous Effects”, we examine case studies for when companies, government organizations, or entire industries have allowed a specific type of waste to escalate to a disastrous effect. In this post, we review the waste of Motion to understand what causes it, how to see it, and how to eliminate it.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina broke the levees in New Orleans’ lower 9th ward, resulting in catastrophic flooding. Despite the desperate and obvious need for relief, local, state, and federal emergency response agencies failed to supply sufficient aide with any level of urgency. Officials deliberated, stalled, and wasted critical time deciding when, how, and rather or not to respond. An estimated 1,836 lives and $108 Billion were lost due to the flooding. It’s difficult to quantify exactly how much of this loss can be attributed to the poor emergency response; but we can all agree that the amount of time and effort wasted prior to providing aide was a complete disaster in itself.

Corrective Action:

During the event, aide, although debatably insufficient, began to arrive for some affected by the flood. Many people have fled the northern gulf coast to cities like Houston, Nashville, and others around the US – never to return home. Programs to help Katrina victims to resettle elsewhere sprang up around the United States. After Katrina, FEMA was granted authority and tools to respond to crisis more urgently, including the Post-Katrina Emergency Response Act (PKERA). This new system was tested a few years later during Hurricane Sandy and the results were markedly improved.

Interesting Fact:

All major studies concluded that the US Army Core of Engineers (USACE) were primarily responsible for the failing levees. However, they were granted immunity under the Flood Control Act of 1928. The USACE cited budgetary constraints for installing the insufficient levee system. This is one case where saving perhaps a few million dollars ending up costing thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars in the end.

For more details on this case study, check out the Wikipedia article at the following link:

Motion waste occurs in abundance in just about any manufacturing or supply chain operation. Anything from reaching across a table to grab the next unit to shuffling pallets in the warehouse to get everything to fit can be considered motion waste. It is nearly impossible to eliminate all motion waste but it can definitely be reduced greatly. Reducing motion waste reduces process cycle times resulting in an increase in throughput. The best way to measure motion waste is the perform a detailed breakdown of the work needed to execute a process called a Time & Motion Study. In this case, the more granular, the better. For example, a time & motion study output might look like this:

Observe how over 30% of the time spent processing this unit was wasted motion. This type of waste can be reduced by identifying the waste from time & motion studies on critical process steps and optimizing workstation design to increase efficiency. This method allows you to optimize for efficiency within a process step at a very technical and granular level; but can yield tremendous cost and lead time savings if you can increase throughput at the bottleneck step by 30%.

Impruver also helps you see motion waste. Motion waste reduces throughput, increases operating costs, and lengthens lead times. Impruver helps to motivate employees to reduce motion waste by highlighting achievements such as Raising the Bar (outperforming the previous standard). When motion waste is reduced, it can lead to the previously established standard being exceeded, at which time best-practices and operator recognition is distributed across your manufacturing network. This helps others to make progress toward creating breakthroughs in performance as well.

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Inventory – any materials or other resources stored or staged until demanded. In this series titled “The 8 Lean Wastes and Their Potentially Disastrous Effects”, we examine case studies for when companies, government organizations, or entire industries have allowed a specific type of waste to escalate to a disastrous effect. In this post, we review the waste of Inventory to understand what causes it, how to see it, and how to eliminate it. Lean.org defines inventory as “materials (and information) present along a value stream between processing steps.”

In 2007, Toyota issued a massive recall that affected 9 Billion vehicles worldwide. The recall was triggered by several reports of gas pedals “sticking” and causing unintended acceleration. At the time of the incident, dealerships across the US were holding substantial amounts of inventory, which could not be sold until they were all serviced to minimize the risk of further unintended acceleration issues. A study was conducted to estimate the losses associated with all of this inventory that was placed on “hold”, which revealed that dealerships were losing the staggering amount of $2.5 Billion per month in combined income.

Corrective Action:

In response to this issue, Toyota conducted an investigation to identify the root cause of the unintended acceleration and concluded that the configuration between the floor mat and the gas pedal was defective. They also began to experiment with an alternative supply chain model with the Toyota Scion where a base unit would be built to about 70% at the factory, then buyers would be allowed to customize how the vehicle would be finished. Finally, the base unit would be shipped to the buyer’s local dealer to complete the final manufacturing steps; a process known as Late-Stage Customization. This kept inventory low for the Scion at the dealerships and allowed consumers more control over the features and functionality that would be included with their vehicle. Unfortunately, the Scion did not perform well in the market; however, I don’t think the supply chain model was the problem. It simply isn’t a very good looking car.

Interesting Fact:

Even though Toyota distributes vehicles all over the world, the only reports of unintended acceleration came from the United States. Also, there was never a definitive conclusion for a mechanical failure that was causing the problem. However, once the floor mat / gas pedal configuration was changed, no further issues were reported.

For more details on this case study, check out the 24/7 Wall Street article at the following link:

This case study exposes one of the many major problems with building and carrying inventory. Building inventory has the same issue issue as batching, which is a form of inventory in itself. When there is a quality defect that needs to be contained, many times the entire batch needs to be recalled and investigated due to limited granularity in traceability. This requires the manufacturer to cast a wide net instead of being able to pinpoint the specific units that are affected by the defect.

Another major issue with carrying inventory is that it enables poor manufacturing execution and erodes operational discipline. Part of the equation for determining how much inventory you need is how unreliably your factory performs. In other words, being unreliable means you need to maintain higher inventories to meet service expectations. The path of least resistance is to build inventory as opposed to addressing your factory’s reliability issues. A little trick to kicking off a lean implementation is to cut your finished inventory gradually and challenge your teams to maintain service levels with lower inventory stocks. This will require improving factory reliability and becoming more lean in the process. Finally, inventory hurts your factory’s lead time on special order and rush items. This is because orders often need to wait in inventory buffers in between process steps before the next value-added step can be completed.

Impruver also helps you see waste from inventory, which often manifests itself in the form of unreliability. In Impruver, unreliability shows up as downtime, rate, and yield losses. By addressing these issues, you can increase plant reliability and subsequently reduce safety stocks. When inventory is reduced, working capital is freed up to be invested in other more important matters. Impruver also allows you to quickly estimate the savings to be gained in just one click by driving out efficiency losses. This powerful functionality is made available to everyone from the shop-floor up to be used for justifying continuous improvement ideas.

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A worker operates a forklift to transport floor boards at a wood flooring factory in Huzhou, Zhejiang province July 13, 2012. REUTERS/Sean Yong

Transporting – the act of moving people, materials, or information from one place to another. In this series titled “The 8 Lean Wastes and Their Potentially Disastrous Effects”, we examine case studies for when companies, government organizations, or entire industries have allowed a specific type of waste to escalate to a disastrous effect. In this post, we review the waste of Transporting to understand what causes it, how to see it, and how to eliminate it.

Based on data from the National EMS Information System (NEMSIS), the US national average time for an ambulance to arrive after an emergency call has been placed is 9.4 minutes. Just to level-set, the gold standard for ambulance arrival time is 8 minutes within 90% of the time. The data suggests that, on average, ambulances arrive 1.4 minutes late for an emergency call.

Additionally, the time to transport a patient back to the hospital to receive full treatment averaged 12.2 minutes in the dataset. This means that the time between the emergency call and the patient arriving at the hospital averaged almost 22 minutes in total.

Copyright 2016 Manuficient Consulting

Interesting Fact:

The chances of surviving cardiac arrest diminishes greatly after 5 or 6 minutes of waiting time. How many deaths or serious complications could be prevented if we could design an emergency medical system with an overall response time of less than 5 minutes?

Transporting waste is abundant in just about any manufacturing or supply chain system. Since, for all practical purposes, multiple objects cannot occupy the same space at a time, transporting is an inevitable condition in the way we live, work, and play. One of the challenges to reducing transporting waste is that most methods of measuring productivity fail to highlight its existence. It’s important to measure delivery lead time from step to step within the factory and throughout the supply chain to help identify transporting waste; this also needs to be monitored on a continuous basis. Once you know to look for this type of waste, losses can fairly easily be measured and reduced in manufacturing or supply chain processes. For example, tools such as 5S, line layout, work cell design, and point-of-use supply (POUS) are all great approaches to minimize the waste of transporting within a factory.

Impruver also helps you see waste from transporting in the form of lost efficiency. In Impruver, this type of waste could either show up as downtime or rate losses. For example, if operators are having to travel across the factory to retrieve parts needed to perform a changeover, this entire time is captured under the planned downtime category. In this case, you might rearrange where items are being stored or staged in order to minimize transport time, changeovers, and efficiency losses due to planned downtime.

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Waiting – time spent idle or unproductive until parts, materials, information or other inputs are made available. In this series titled “The 8 Lean Wastes and Their Potentially Disastrous Effects”, we examine case studies for when companies, government organizations, or entire industries have allowed a specific type of waste to escalate to a disastrous effect. In this post, we review the waste of Waiting to understand what causes it, how to see it, and how to eliminate it. Leanmanufacturingtools.org defines waiting as “the act of doing nothing or working slowly whilst waiting for a previous step in the process.”

Leading into the Halloween of 1999, Hershey Foods lost over $150M in revenue due to a preventable mishap in supply chain execution. The company tried to “go live” on multiple supply chain management systems at the same time. In addition, they failed to follow the prescribed implementation plan provided by the software’s developers. The result was that even though the product had been produced, they were unable to “see” the project in the newly implemented management systems and subsequently, could not process orders. Their customers and consumers were left waiting for product that did not arrive, which cost Hersey’s $150M and their customers’ businesses also took a hit. Profits dropped 19% for Q3 of that year and continued to drop for Q4 due to lost credibility and damaged customer relationships.

Corrective Action:

Hershey’s then implemented an Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) system that allowed them much greater visibility over their supply chain, inventory, and critical customer data.

Interesting Fact:

The software’s developer estimated 48 months to correctly implement the supply chain management system but Hershey’s rushed the implementation for fear of how Y2K would affect the computer systems. As we’re all aware of now, Y2K had no effect on computer system operability; thus this fearful and rash decision was completely unfounded.

For more details on this case study, check out the CIO article at the following link:

Waiting is a waste that frequently occurs in any manufacturing operation. This is often caused by either poorly balanced work areas or unreliable processes; and sometimes both. The key is to be able to spot waiting waste as it’s happening and take quick action to eliminate it by getting to the root cause and preventing it from happening again. Fortunately, waiting is one of the easiest types of waste to see as it’s happening. It only takes one to be present, engaged, and seeking waiting waste. A great tool for this is to install a high-visibility indicator that detects movement. When the expected movement is not occurring, it can be expected that the process step is waiting and an alert can be provided. Continuous Improvement happens when people actively seek out opportunities to reduce and prevent waiting waste whenever it occurs. This happens when the appropriate cultural behaviors are being promoted.

Impruver also helps you see waiting waste in the form of lost efficiency. In Impruver, waiting waste would either show up as Rate Loss (if the line is running but below standard rate) or Unplanned Downtime Loss (if the line is stopped and the stoppage is recorded). This enables you to not only capture losses but also to quantify the financial impact that waiting waste is having on your business.

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Overproduction – the act of making more of something than is immediately required. In this series titled “The 8 Lean Wastes and Their Potentially Disastrous Effects”, we examine a case study for when companies, government organizations, or entire industries have allowed a specific type of waste to escalate to a disastrous effect. In this post, we review the waste of Overproduction to understand what causes it, how to see it, and how to eliminate it. Wikipedia defines overproduction as “excess of supply over demand of products being offered to the market. This leads to lower prices and/or unsold goods along with the possibility of unemployment.”

In 1988, chemical manufacturing company PEPCON, located in Hersonson, NV experienced a massive explosion of 4,500 metric tons of Ammonium Perchlorate (AP). The facility was producing AP, which is used as an oxidizer in rocket fuel, for the Challenger Space Program. In 1986 the Challenger Program was suspended after the space craft exploded in mid-air only 72 seconds after launch. PEPCON decided to continue production of AP even though there was no longer a demand for it as a way to sustain production capability without inflating costs. The company assumed that they might be able to sell the excess AP to other government programs or to the Challenger Program if it were to ever come back online. They stored the excess product in containers in a parking lot near the production facility. Finally, one of the containers containing the AP ignited and the entire highly-combustive lot went up in smoke. The explosion cause catastrophic damage, destroying the PEPCON factory and other nearby factories and residential property.

The explosion resulted in 2 deaths and and 372 injuries. It also created about $100M in related damages.

Corrective Action:

In response to this incident, the Nevada legislature passed the Chemical Catastrophe Prevention Act in 1991, and later the Chemical Accident Prevention Program.

Interesting Fact:

4,500 metric tons of this product and others were being stored on site at the time of the explosion in aluminum, HDPE, and steel drums. The blast range of the explosion was a 10 mile radius. The actual cause of the fire was never officially determined.

For more details on this case study, check out the Wikipedia article at the following link:

Overproduction is one of the most dangerous types of lean waste because it enables all other forms of waste to occur. When factories overproduce, they create buffers that allow the manufacturing process to become disjointed from the subsequent elements of the supply chain. This enables process waste to fester in the manufacturing stage because problems in the production process have little to no effect in the company’s ability to satisfy customer demand. This buffer removes the “pain” of poor production execution and the factory loses the discipline required for true operational excellence.

There are management tools that can help to minimize the detrimental effects of overproduction and provide the foundation for increasing operational discipline. OEE is one great example for how to measure productivity so that overproduction can be eliminated and the factory can transition to more of an on-demand operation with minimal finished inventory. Impruver is a fantastic tool for implementing OEE that also drives a grassroots culture of getting better everyday.